This is America in 2015, and as Sam Quinones describes in his astonishing, monumental new book, Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic, we’re in the midst of “the worst drug scourge to ever hit the country,” measuring by its death toll. Unlike the heroin plague of the 1970s or the crack epidemic of the 1980s, however, the current disaster is “happening quietly,” he writes. This has a lot to do with the population perhaps hardest hit: middle-class and affluent white folks. Shock and shame are powerful silencers.

“Children of the most privileged group in the wealthiest country in the history of the world were getting hooked and dying in almost epidemic numbers from substances meant to, of all things, numb pain,” he writes. “Crime was at historic lows, drug overdose deaths at record highs. A happy facade covered a disturbing reality.”

2.Dreamland is really two stories, divided by a prescription pad. On one side is the painkiller OxyContin, which clocked a reported $3.1 billion in annual sales, even after its manufacturer, Purdue Pharma, paid a $634.5 million criminal fine in 2007 for misleading marketing practices. On the other side is a “sticky dark substance known as ‘black tar,’ a semi-processed heroin.” Chemically, the substances aren’t so different.

The story of black tar heroin traces back to a small, dirt-poor town in the Mexican state of Nayarit. Xalisco wouldn’t be noteworthy were it not a staging area for what Quinones — a former veteran L.A. Times reporter, who writes with clarity and confidence — describes as a “new kind of drug trafficking in America.” The trafficking system took root outside Los Angeles, in the late 1980s and ’90s and has since spread to San Diego, Phoenix, Denver, Albuquerque, Indianapolis, Nashville, Cincinnati, Charlotte, and other cities. If you’ve heard about heroin in your town, there’s a good chance it came from opium poppies growing in the Mexican mountains.

The Xalisco Boys aren’t the flashy, gun-slinging gangsters you’ve seen in Hollywood films, though. The network’s foot soldiers — a near-endless supply of farm boys eager to make cash to send or bring back home — are polite, nonviolent, salaried, and sober. Their product is cheap and pure, and “Their job is to drive the city with their mouths full of little uninflated balloons of black tar heroin, twenty-five or thirty at a time in one mouth,” Quinones writes. “They look like chipmunks…[with] a bottle of water at the ready so if police pull them over, they swig the water and swallow the balloons.” Quinones, who has written two previous books about Mexico, is particularly good at taking us inside the minds of these low-level dealers. “Back in the ranchos, nothing said that a man had moved up in the world like walking around in public in dark-blue [Levi’s] 501s,” he writes.

In one of the book’s more captivating chapters, he describes the establishment of a “cell” in Columbus, Ohio, from the perspective of regional manager identified as “the Man.” After arriving in town, the Man sends for more “kids from Xalisco,” finds a car lot willing to swap for new delivery cars every few months, and establishes twice-daily shifts of drivers who meet addicts at Burger King and in Kmart parking lots. Soon, the Man has to hire a tailor in L.A. to sew custom underwear for female members of his crew. “For more than a year, he sent two girls a month back to Mexico with a hundred thousand dollars in pure Columbus, Ohio, profit tucked in their corsets.”

To addicts across the U.S., the little balloons from Xalisco Boys “became a brand every bit as dependable as a Coke can or a Holiday Inn sign,” Quinones reports. And the distribution network — which lacked a central power structure that could be easily toppled — grew resilient enough to absorb the largest joint DEA/FBI operation in U.S. history, involving more than 180 arrests in a dozen cities. After “Operation Tar Pit,” heroin deliveries in Santa Fe paused only for a day.

3.In the other half of Dreamland, Quinones takes readers over some of the terrain New York Times reporter Barry Meier mapped in his 2003 book on OxyContin, Pain Killer: A “Wonder” Drug’s Trail of Addiction and Death. Quinones introduces readers to the man Meier called a “scientific superstar:” Dr. Russell Portenoy, a pain expert and opiate evangelist who helped usher in an era when patients’ pain is measured as a “fifth vital sign” alongside temperature, pulse, breathing rate, and blood pressure. We also meet Arthur Sackler, the fantastically rich (and now deceased) co-owner of Purdue Pharma whom Meier described as a hybrid M.D.-adman who, many believed, “cloaked his pursuit of profit and power behind the veil of science and research.”

Dreamland picks up the same threads that Meier explored, and Quinones’s chapter-long riff on OxyContin’s rise is a masterpiece. I would reprint here it in full, if I could; it’s that important and well reported. But I’ll just quote a passage in which he frames the story:

The decade of the 1990s was the era of the blockbuster drug, the billion-dollar pill, and a pharmaceutical sales force arms race was a part of the excess of the time. The industry’s business model was based on creating a pill – for cholesterol, depression, pain, or impotence — and then promoting it with growing numbers of salespeople. During the 1990s and into the next decade, Arthur Sackler’s vision of pharmaceutical promotion reached its most exquisite expression as drug companies hired ever-larger sales teams. In 1995, 35,000 Americans were pharmaceutical sales reps. Ten years later, a record 110,000 people — Sackler’s progeny all — were traveling the country selling legal drugs in America.

Quinones adds layers of nauseating detail: the exorbitant bonuses for Purdue salespeople who peddled OxyContin to primary-care docs under-trained in treating chronic pain; the promotional videos that under-reported the pill’s addictive potential (never vetted by the FDA, as they ought to have been); the OxyContin-branded hats, toys, mugs, golf balls, CDs, pads, and pens that rained down on doctors; the Purdue lawyers who made phone calls to folks talking candidly about addiction in small-town newspapers. At one point, during a 2007 sentencing hearing for Purdue executives, the mother of an OxyContin overdose victim tells them, “You are nothing more than a large corporate drug cartel.”

Dreamland’s chapters jump in time and place from a heroin trafficker’s childhood in Nayarit to a legless addict in Portland, Ore. to a grief-stricken parent in Southern Ohio, and so on. It’s an ambitious approach reminiscent of Eugene Jarecki’s sweeping 2012 documentary, The House I Live In, which offered a devastating, pointillist portrait of the War on Drugs, through interviews with professors from Ohio State and Harvard, drug cops from Florida to New Mexico, a federal judge in Iowa, and a prisoner in Oklahoma who tells Jarecki, “I have life without parole for three ounces of methamphetamine.” In Dreamland, so many names, facts, and breakdowns of complex concepts can be overwhelming, at times; I found myself pausing to give my brain a chance to breathe.

But such a wide-reaching approach seems necessary to convey the “catastrophic synergy” when the paths of Purdue Pharma and the Xalisco Boys cross. “And so it went,” he writes:

OxyContin [came] first, introduced by reps from Purdue Pharma over steak and dessert and in air-conditioned doctors’ offices. Within a few years, black tar heroin followed in tiny, uninflated balloons held in the mouths of sugarcane farm boys from Xalisco driving old Nissan Sentras to meet-ups in McDonald’s parking lots…

“I’ve yet to find one who didn’t start with OxyContin, [a family physician in Southern Ohio] said. “They wouldn’t be selling this quantity of heroin on the street right now if they hadn’t made these decisions in the boardroom.”

4.The U.S. will never solve its deadly opiate epidemic if we don’t first admit we have a problem. And Dreamland is one of those rare books that’s big and vivid and horrifying enough to shake up our collective consciousness. In that sense, its comparable to Nick Reding’s 2009 book, Methland: The Death and Life of An American Small Town, which landed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review thanks to a Walter Kirn review quoting Reding’s description of what it’s like inside an exploding meth lab: “His skin was dripping off his body in sheets…His nose was all but gone now, too, and he ran back and forth among the gathered neighbors, unable to scream, for his esophagus and his voice box had cooked inside his throat.”

Methland covers different ground than Dreamland, chemically and geographically. But it’s a similar attempt to sweep startling images into readers’ minds. Consider these passages from the books’ introductions. First, an excerpt from Dreamland, after Quinones describes the heroin overdose death of a private-school-educated 21 year old from Columbus, Ohio:

Drug overdoses were killing more people every year than car accidents…Kids were dying in the Rust Belt of Ohio and the Bible Belt of Tennessee. Some of the worst of it was in Charlotte’s best country club enclaves. It was in Mission Viejo and Simi Valley in suburban Southern California, and in Indianapolis, Salt Lake, and Albuquerque, in Oregon and Minnesota and Oklahoma and Alabama. For each of the thousands who died every year, many hundreds more were addicted.

Via pills, heroin had entered the mainstream. The new addicts were football players and cheerleaders; football was almost a gateway to opiate addiction. Wounded soldiers returned from Afghanistan hooked on pain pills and died in America. Kids got hooked in college and died there. Some of these addicts were from rough corners of rural Appalachia. But many more were from the U.S. middle class. They lived in communities where the driveways were clean, the cars were new, and the shopping centers attracted congregations of Starbucks, Home Depot, CVS, and Applebee’s. They were the daughters of preachers, the sons of cops and doctors, the children of contractors and teachers and business owners and bankers.

This section from Methland, meanwhile, follows an idyllic description of Oelwein, Iowa, (population 6,772), where much of the book is set:

And yet, things are not entirely what they seem. On a sultry May evening, with…temperatures approaching ninety degrees at dusk, pass by the Perk and Hub City on the way into Oelwein’s tiny Ninth Ward. Look down at the collapsing sidewalk, or across the vacant lot at a burned-out home. At the Conoco station, just a few blocks south of Sacred Heart [Catholic Church], a young man in a trench coat picks through the Dumpster, shaking despite the heat. Here, amid the double-wides of the Ninth Ward, among the packs of teenage boys riding, gang-like, on their Huffy bicycles, the economy and culture of Oelwein are more securely tied to a drug than to either of the two industries that have forever sustained the town: farming and small business. This is the part of Oelwein, and of the small-town United States, not visible from the plane window as the flat stretch of the country rolls by. After sundown in the Ninth Ward, the warm, nostalgic light that had bathed the nation beneath a late-afternoon transcontinental flight is gone.

Against the oppressive humidity, the night’s spells begin to take shape. Mixed with the moist, organic scent of cut grass at dew point is the ether-stink of methamphetamine cooks at work in their kitchens. Main Street, just three blocks distant, feels as far away as Chicago. For life in Oelwein is not, in fact, a picture-postcard amalgamation of farms and churches and pickup trucks, Fourth of July fireworks and Nativity scenes, bake sales and Friday-night football games. Nor is life simpler or better or truer here than it is in Los Angeles or New York or Tampa or Houston. Life in the small-town United States has, though, changed considerably in the last three decades…Main Street was no longer divided between Leo’s and the Do Drop Inn, or between the Perk and the Bakery: it was partitioned between the farmer and the tweaker.

There is a David Lynch-y vibe to both of these passages, where, like in Twin Peaks or the opening sequence of Blue Velvet, we zoom in on wholesome archetypes to find them broken, corrupted — a Norman Rockwell painting on a rotting canvas. But there’s a key difference between Lynch’s work and Pain Killer, Methland, and Dreamland, which, together, make a searing nonfiction triptych of 21st-century American life. Switching off the TV won’t make these stories disappear.

Philip Eil
is a freelance journalist based in Rhode Island. He has been a lecturer in the Rhode Island School of Design's Literary Arts + Studies department since 2011. You can follow him on Twitter (@phileil) and Facebook.

Borges tells us of a civilization where cartographers produced the perfect map: one “whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.” In the next breath, he concedes that this map was useless. Though Borges titles his tale “On Exactitude in Science,” it might serve as a parable for the novelist. One sets out to document a time, a place, a series of events… but even a single escalator ride (as Nicholson Baker’sThe Mezzanine has shown us) can take up 50,000 words. It turns out that the novel, that capacious canvas, demands selection. Compression. Let this protagonist stand in for an army. Let this page break signify the passage of years.In his new novel, Sacred Games, Vikram Chandra sets out to map contemporary Bombay, and despite his many achievements, the novel threatens to become as boundless and ungovernable as the city itself. I don’t mean that Sacred Games is too long; I’d happily sit through another 900 pages of Chandra’s balanced prose, provided that each paragraph felt necessary. But if the same conversation occurs three times in the course of Chandra’s novel, he feels duty-bound to report each exchange. If a peripheral character has been scarred by the Partition that occurred 50 years ago this month, Chandra insists on telling us how. If a character takes a notion to cruise penis-enhancement websites, we get a list of URLs.The set-up is promising: Inspector Sartaj Singh, a sartorially adept member of the Bombay police force, is tipped off to the whereabouts of gang leader Ganesh Gaitonde. Gaitonde eludes capture in the style of a Roman senator – packing himself off to that great hoosegow in the sky – but the circumstances of his death disclose a plot that dwarfs any of his previous crimes. In alternating chapters, Sartaj races against the clock to thwart the conspiracy, and Gaitonde narrates, from beyond the grave, his own rise to (and fall from) power.Its potboiler conventions lend Sacred Games a measure of glitter, but it’s as an anthropological investigation that the novel strikes gold. The novel’s linguistic curry, spiced with Hindi and Urdu slang, delivers a taste of the polyphonic vitality of Bombay. A few vividly rendered locations – Chowpatty Beach and seedy Indian restaurants and a Sikh temple – evoke the entirety of Sartaj Singh’s world. (One senses always the teeming masses in the background.) And the various sectarian fault-lines of present-day India are fully, fictionally realized: not only does the author see them, he evaluates them. He instructs, as well as entertains.Likewise, Chandra excels at procedural detail. He depicts the corruption and brutality of Bombay police-work with a journalist’s eye for minutiae. If Sartaj Singh begins the book as a cipher, time chips away at the uneasy peace he’s made with the demands of his job. Eventually, we see him longing, underneath, for something better. Here is Sartaj contemplating a bomb-scare:”He was at his desk, in his dingy little office with the weathered benches and untidy shelves. Kamble was hunched over a report. Two constables were laughing in the corridor outside. There was a little pool of sunlight from a window, and a pair of hopping little sparrows on the sill. And all of it was dreamlike, as gauzy as the wafting of early morning. If you let yourself believe in that other monstrous thing, even a little, then this ordinary world of bribes and divorces and electricity bills vanished a little.”This last clause, cascading from the immoral to the amoral, suspends Sartaj between detachment and attachment. Detachment, attachment: isn’t this the dialectic that keeps our great cities alive?Gaitonde’s character moves in the opposite direction. As an outlaw, he begins the book with a certain charismatic capital, but the repetitiveness of his megalomania – “Ganesh Gaitonde Makes a Film”; “Ganesh Gaitonde is Recruited”; “Ganesh Gaitonde is Recruited Again”; Ganesh Gaitonde Gets Plastic Surgery – depletes our interest. And here the novel’s more-is-more aesthetic runs up against the more-is-less principle of Borgesian cartography.Pankaj Mishra, similarly vexed by Gaitonde, has pointed to Chandra’s ambition to transcend the bourgeois morality of the Western novel. But Chandra wants Gaitonde, like Hannibal Lecter, to interest us precisely because he’s bad. And Hannibal was more engaging on celluloid than on the page. Gaitonde starts out round, but ends up as two-dimensional as a movie poster. It’s a shame, too, as Chandra can invest a supporting character like Sartaj’s partner, Kartekar or his boss, Parulkar, with real weight. And in the case of Sartaj’s mother (the focus of one of the book’s four historical “insets,” or novella-length digressions), he can bring a character fully to life.Those insets, indeed, contain some of Sacred Games’ strongest writing. But they read like aborted novels, tangential to this one. Against the fine descriptions and effortless historical significance of an inset such as “The Great Game,” the Gaitonde-Sartaj plotline devolves into lunacy: nuclear terrorism, international espionage, and an evil-criminal-genius-cum-Vedic-guru. Chandra wants to license this “filminess” by appealing to the kitchen-sink aesthetic of Bollywood, but he fails to master the requirements of genre fiction, which are, in their own way, as demanding as those of realism. The palpable tension and richness of Sartaj’s quotidian life dissolve just as they should be deepening.Ultimately, Sacred Games comes off as a very serious book and a very silly one glued on to the same spine. This may well be part of Chandra’s program. But inclusiveness doesn’t always deepen our engagement in a fictional world. Sometimes, it can enforce a curious distance from it. Craving immersion in a perspective, we instead find ourselves standing outside a teeming flatness, unsure where we’re supposed to look.Notwithstanding Chandra’s debt to the realist doorstops of Dickens and Thackeray, the dissolution of point-of-view is (arguably like Bombay itself) a postmodern phenomenon. And perhaps in its Dhamaka plot, its refusal to reconcile the filmi and the literary, and its overwhelming expansiveness, Sacred Games corresponds more exactly to the city Chandra loves than a shapely narrative could. Still, fiction is no science. It is the art of illusion – useful illusion – and I look for this gifted writer, in his next novel, to focus his impressive energies toward some brighter (if not bigger) bang.

Comrade is a loaded word. Tongzhi, literally “same aspiration,” was the appropriate term of address for an entire generation of Chinese, from influential Party officials and generals to ordinary mothers, street-sweepers, and butchers. Its usage signified membership in a shared, Communist dream of equality and progress. Sometime in the late-’80s, tongzhi took on a secondary meaning for a less public community. It began to mean “gay.”

Unlike many linguistic changes, this shift was deliberate. The new connotation was proposed by Edward Lam, one of the artist-activists who organized the first Hong Kong Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in 1989. In borrowing and reshaping tongzhi, with its suggestion of unity and shared purpose, they hoped to bring gay Chinese people out of the shadows and into the broader community. That same year, the Tiananmen protests began. Then the Berlin Wall collapsed. Tongzhi took off, but the broader community it once symbolized had fallen apart. You have to wonder if activists had begun to feel uneasy about the term by 1990, and the promises it seemed to make.

Among mainland China’s earliest, best known, and most influential contemporary gay novels, Beijing Comrades(originally called Beijing Story) is also China’s first known e-novel. Its pseudonymous author (here called Bei Tong, nothing more than a contraction of the book’s title, Beijing Tongzhi) published the narrative in segments incorporating the suggestions of online readers; the first installment went live in November of 1998, nearly a decade after Tiananmen. The result was a classic of queer consciousness-raising erotica.

It was also the beginning of a vogue. As the ’90s drew to a close, Internet literature — novels, stories, articles, and essays produced online — took off. While fan fiction and other forms of Internet literature (wangluo wenhua) enjoy popularity around the world, nothing compares to Chinese readers’ passion for the form at its height. By 2012, there were more Chinese reading online literature than doing online shopping.

The popularity of Internet literature was ostensibly driven by the threat of official print censorship. More likely it was the result of expanded Web access for a wide variety of readers and writers, communicating readily, quickly, and cheaply. Users’ efforts to create a peer-to-peer network were not so different from the motives of late-’80s gay activists working to establish a community of equals. As one early Internet writer noted, “The real significance of Internet literature is that it gives literature back to the people.”

Like the Gospels, a cultural touchstone of a different stripe, Beijing Story exists in several radically different versions. Despite its outsize popular influence — Beijing Comrades was also made into a 2001 movie by Stanley Kwan — the book has never been officially published in mainland China, or rendered into English. This translation is based on an expanded version prepared by Bei Tong in hopes of a state-sanctioned (guanfang) publication, although the state’s blessing — necessary for mainland publication — was ultimately withheld.

And like the Gospels, Beijing Comrades has its own apocrypha. “There are those who believe that she is a tongqi,” translator Scott E. Myers writes of the author, “a heterosexual woman with the misfortune of unknowingly marrying a gay man. Others suggest that he is novelist and essayist Wang Xiaobo” — despite the fact that Wang Xiaobo was dead when the novel was written in 1998.

There is also this particularly tantalizing explanation: Bei Tong, author of that enduring vision of gay male affection, may be a straight Chinese woman living overseas. (At minimum, a Chinese someone living overseas; Myers remains somewhat ecumenical.) Bored and aimless as a New York expat, Bei Tong has explained, “I immersed myself in the world of the Internet: playing chess, chatting online, surfing porn sites. When I read all the pornographic stories that were out there, my first thought was: F—! What the hell is this? I knew I could write something better.”

And then she did.

Our lovers don’t meet cute — they meet dismissive. Handong, the narrator, is a self-confessed “brat” making his vague fortune in business. Lan Yu, a Xinjiang kid working his way through college, is at first unimpressive: boyish, underdeveloped, with uncertain Mandarin and a “faint anxiety in his eyes.” “Don’t your parents give you money for school?” Handong asks during one of their first exchanges. The irony of the book’s title, at least in this translation, is soon apparent. Our titular lovers are not comrades at all, with the equality of income, status, and purpose that the term implies. Lan Yu asks for a job, and Handong thinks something could be arranged. In the morning, he leaves Lan Yu 1,000 yuan and a note to forget about working and focus on his studies. Lan Yu takes only half, and as a loan. He intends to make good.

Although the novel, in its earliest iteration, was written at the turn of the century, it is intended as a decade-sweeping period piece, beginning in the mercurial 1980s. Handong rhapsodizes on
the many distractions ushered in by the so-called age of reform, the era of primitive accumulation that had promised to transform China from an impoverished nation into a powerful one…In principle even those without powerful family backgrounds could jockey for successes never before thought possible. All you needed was some guts and determination and entry into the get-rich-quick class was yours for the taking.
The plot of Beijing Comrades is, in part, the story of Lan Yu’s self-making under Handong’s watchful eye. Lan Yu works a string of more or less menial jobs that span the range of his worlds: as a tutor, as a construction worker pulling 12-hour shifts in the summer, much to Handong’s amusement. “‘Five-hundred yuan a month!’ I repeated with a derisive laugh. ‘A motel hooker’s asking price is four times that!…Besides, what the hell kind of job is that?’”) Handong offers him instead a series of easy luxuries and interest-free loans, which Lan Yu virtuously resists.

Erotic fiction is a careful trick to manage: detailed enough to feel fresh and compelling, spare enough to feel — in the reader’s hands — participatory. The characters themselves, particularly Lan Yu, have the blank, Mad Libs quality of much romantic fiction. “He had the clean, soapy smell typical of young men,” Handong considers. “When I looked at his face, I saw not just a handsome young man, but the breathtaking power of youth.” In his afterword, Petrus Liu refers to Lan Yu, perhaps charitably, as a “role model of nonidentity.” Still, this too is the tactic of much romantic fiction, at least since Pamelaand Pygmalion: as the audience imagines its personal Lan Yu, Handong shapes one in his own image. Handong’s “nefarious agenda,” as he playfully admits, is “to make [Lan Yu] shake off the cultural and intellectual arrogance of the new world and learn to enjoy the material pleasures of the new one.”

As Lan Yu holds firm, Handong begins to wonder “which emotion was stronger, my affection or my resentment.” Affection wins out, as it must. For Handong, Beijing Comrades is a story of slowly softening and falling in love. Although he initially sees his time with Lan Yu as no more than a sexy hobby — “like horse-racing,” as he explains to his distraught mother — he eventually wises up and sees the error of his ways. He swears devotion, just in time for the Year of the Snake.

As a tribute to the ’80s, the novel is sweetly nostalgic. The Teresa Teng cassette sitting on a dresser will bring back memories for Chinese of a certain age, as will chunky Big Boss cell phones and the ideological preciousness of characters’ names — Handong (defend Mao), Aidong (love Mao), and Jingdong (revere Mao) make for formidable siblings. There are references to West Berlin, and the capital’s beautiful blue skies in the summer, when “[f]or three solid months, there wasn’t a bicycle lot in Beijing that wasn’t jam packed.” By the end, as the millennium approaches, our heroes are stepping out of their “burgundy Cole Haans” and slipping into the boudoir.

“The intensity of two men making love can never be matched by straight sex,” Handong proclaims, and Bei Tong makes you believe it. The book falls significantly higher on the erotica spectrum than Fifty Shades of Gray. The lovers’ sexual adventures are compellingly rendered by Myers, who, by marvelous coincidence, was working at a gay bar in Beijing even as Bei Tong was writing her novel in New York. Like the love affair, his translation begins a little stiltedly, but becomes increasingly assured. Slang is a barrier never fully crossed, but Myers makes capable work of “the local vernacular, which was so legendarily vulgar it had its own title: Beijing Bitching.” It’s a plausible summary of the book, from Lan Yu’s perspective.

Once firmly united, the lovers’ romance is strikingly sweet and normative. “He smiled and pushed his nose against mine as if he were a bear rolling its cub…‘I don’t have to come,’ I whispered into his ear. ‘I just want to hold you.’” The novel finds new tension in an implausible series of disasters: tonsillitis, coma, cerebral hemorrhage; suicidal parent, wicked stepmother; seedy prostitutes, sexual assault; criminal investigations, stints in prison; reversals of fortune, sad parting after sad parting after sad parting. Tiananmen features as a plot point, but only as a winsome threat to poor Lan Yu. Ditto the cringe-worthy red herrings about AIDS. (“If you meet someone new,” Handong warns, “you have to be careful. I don’t want to hear through the grapevine that you’ve caught some kind of disease!”)

For all its sad, socially conscious pillow-talk (“Do you think gay people can have everlasting love?” Handong asks), it would be a mistake to view Beijing Comrades as an accurate chronicle of the Deng Xiaoping era, or as a representative document of gay Chinese romance. The novel is, ultimately, the stylized erotic fantasy of a (straight? female?) expat, with considerable help from online readers, produced 20 years after the fact.

But despite the author’s likely inexperience, Beijing Comrades is filled with confident, jaded insider tips — how to treat virgins, what types of women to avoid. Handong speaks with same assurance on these topics as he does on Deng Xiaoping’s China. “There’s no doubt about it,” he declares, “it’s a hell of a lot easier to seduce a man than a woman.” When it comes to women, the novel’s tone is consistently snide. Characters, plagued by needy girlfriends and manipulative spendthrift wives, complain of “the typical flat ass of most Asian girls” and their friends’ “shrill, housewife bitching.” “When a woman has sex with you,” Handong explains, “it’s because of something you have… or because they want to find someone who will let them be a parasite forever.” When Lan Yu feels jealous, Handong orders him to “Stop acting like a woman. Every little thing makes you so damn suspicious.”

It’s a curious structural misogyny, perhaps the result of a misunderstanding on the author’s part, a belief that men love men because they hate women. As the novel progresses, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell the difference between disdain for a conventional mainstream life and hatred for women, who never come off well. Nor do foreigners, for that matter — neither the “damn Japanese” nor the Western “imperialist aggressors.” The solution is a gay socialist utopia built for two.

In one of the novel’s happiest moments, Handong and Lan Yu driving through the hills, goofily singing the March of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army: “’The hope of our people is on our backs, an invincible power are we!… March on! Our troops march toward the sun! To the victory of the revolution, and the entire nation’s liberation!’ We fell into peals of laughter. Never had a song felt so good.”

The cultural order may have fallen with Mao Zedong, but Bei Tong finds that lost feeling of political and social cohesion in an ideal same-sex relationship, placing all the charged meaning of tongzhi, in its traditional sense, in a gay couple. Created on a website, crowd-sourced in serial, Beijing Comrades is the people’s public fantasy of intimacy. Handong wonders “whether two ‘comrades’ could be lifelong partners, loving one another and taking care of each other til the end.” Beijing Comrades is one generation’s best effort.

Blake Butler’s frenetic prose transforms rather than comforts. His nightmarish new novel, 300,000,000 has its thematic and syntactic origins in “The Disappeared,” (pdf) a story from his debut collection Scorch Atlas (2009). A teenager’s abuse is discovered during a high school scoliosis check: “Even the cheerleaders saw my bruises.” The boy’s father is made to “shoot free-throws to prove he was a man.” His airballs land him in prison. Parentless, the boy is placed under the care of his porn-watching uncle. The boy longs for his absent mother, whose disappearance is representative of a wider thinning of the population. This pandemic has reached his school, where “Baskets of dental floss and disinfectant were placed in the nurse’s office with the condoms.” Paramilitary officers tackle teachers when they attempt to leave the building. Dead bodies begin to pile. Students “who weren’t sick were going crazy. I watched a boy stick out his own eyes. I watched a girl bang her head on a blackboard.” Surrounded by death, the boy seeks life — the life of his lost mother. He places dots on a map to represent his sightings of her, and the constellation forms her face. Among the wordplay and the gore and the hyperbole, Butler’s final mode is love.

300,000,000, is the logical and emotional evolution of “The Disappeared.” Butler is too young for this new novel to be his endgame, but the book arrives with the feeling that it announces an aesthetic pivot. Butler’s books have been cataloging language’s increasing inability to document America at its exhausted margins. 300,000,000 is a long, unwieldy work. Some readers will flaunt its difficulty like a badge. Others won’t be able to finish. Those who can reach the final pages will be rewarded, though perhaps not with the conventional crowns of fiction. Butler’s work is not for everyone, but for its rightful audience, his fragmented narratives are like revelations.

The novel begins with the discovery of a notebook belonging to an alleged serial killer, Gretch Gravey. Mute upon capture, Gravey’s writing does the talking. His prose is thick with Biblicisms. He seems destined to not merely kill, but consume or absorb the novel’s titular amount of Americans. Gravey’s goal is metamorphosis. Transfiguration. His persona shifts into those he has spiritually consumed, a seemingly endless parade of boys and mothers held prisoners in a house full of sex, drugs, and death. No matter the unnamed narrative voice, all of Gravey’s narrators sound like Butler’s trademark syntax and description: “During this era, Gravey wore his white hair like a robe a lot, wrapped around his fangled body with the weird bruises at his softer points such as his calves and pits and chin, as the networking womb inside him widened.” Long sentences that curve around commas. Scrambled registers of language, with the colloquial and pop living next to the archaic. Images of mothers, births, homes, and night. References to bodies as “meat.” Butler’s repetitions feel less like mannerisms and more like the refrains of some new literary religion. His characters speak in tongues.

Gravey’s disciples litter the first half of the novel. It is difficult to discern what is real, and what is not, although part of Butler’s linguistic project appears the cleaving of sign from signified. Jacob Korg has argued that the genius of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was not his ability to be mimetic, but his belief that language was ultimately transformative. Words warped the world. Near the moment when the reader might become frustrated with this novel — wondering whether Gravey’s cannibalistic murders are hallucinations or actualities — Butler’s project becomes apparent. Gravey’s goal is to kill everybody in America, and he claims the best part about that plan is that “you can begin with anybody in America.”

Detective E.N. Flood, the man assigned to the case, whose footnotes complement the narrative text, then fully enters the story. His admission: “Honestly at this point I want to burn the book. I also find myself thinking I want to eat it, that I want to get the sentences tattooed on my body. The thought snakes through me in my voice. I have been sleeping with the book at night whether I do or not, like suddenly it’s in my arms, or it feels like it is. It is a pressure. A dress. It kind of itches. As an afterthought, I have covered up the mirrors in my home, though not those in my car. Suddenly I feel over-aware of the number of mirrors I come into contact with daily, often without having even noticed their presence in the room. The book continues.”

300,000,000 bothered me. I’ve been unsettled by William S. Burroughs and Kathy Acker, but Butler’s work arrives with a firmer theology. In a recent interview, Butler explains “I am not religious in the churchgoing sense or probably even many other senses, though I do believe in god, at least where the idea of god could be some force that exists outside reality. I do not necessarily understand why any human would imagine an illimitable entity and then think they can have a relationship with it as a human. My spirituality is more like silence, which is holier to me than wafers and wine.” God is simultaneously present and absent in Butler’s canon. He is never, though, forgotten. The maniacal bloodletting in 300,000,000 is a frightening reminder that there is still blood to be let. Butler’s book wonders what would happen if one man attempted to kill America not with planes or disease or bombs, but with hate, with a pure evil. At one point in the novel, Gravey’s convoluted plan runs out of luck. He is arrested, “found facedown in the smallest room of his seven-room ranch-style home with legs bound at the ankle by a length of electrical wire, apparently administered by his own hands.” But there is no peace. The nightmare merely is given another mask. Detective Flood’s notes become more poetic and perverse. He describes the smell of Gravey’s home as “sweet…The sweetness was revolting. But it was also — I breathed it in.” Like Gravey, Flood’s identity becomes tenuous. He is more letters than man. He becomes Darrel, an amorphous identity that previously belonged to Gravey and snakes through the novel.

Other investigators are confounded by Gravey’s seemingly endless tapes. They are not blank, merely the “white of a white loom.” The viewers see what they want to see, since the “eyes play tricks inside their wishing boredom.” The novel’s footnotes begin communicating with, and contradicting, each other. Flood disappears, and when he returns his notes are even more apocalyptic. He is searching for something more than Gravey, “Something outside the potential aspect of god or what had been or could be. Something a language didn’t own.”

Fiction’s ability to reveal the fallibility of language is nothing new. What Butler offers is, curiously enough, something religion posits: language is inadequate to capture existence. Butler’s sentences stretch toward the invisible, the mystical, but they are unable to reach it. They snap back. They break. For Butler, the evil of Gravey, the evil omnipresent within 300,000,000, is beyond the scope of his sentences. What else would we expect of evil? What else would we expect of God?

In “The Disappeared,” the parentless narrator sneaks glances at the pornography ordered by his uncle. The boy is more than disinterested; he is afraid. The women “had the mark of something brimming in them. Something ruined and old and endless.” Soon that ruined, old, endless dread becomes physical and parasitic. With 300,000,000, Butler has created a literary artifact. Gravey’s hellish experiments move beyond the walls of his bloodsoaked home and permeate his country. A “football hero” stands “with the Luger to his temple on the fifty-yard line. The banker handing back a withdrawal in the form of a sheet of his own skin. Gas station attendants robbing the customers of their consciousness.” One unidentified speaker wonders “What is happening in America?…We must act now. This is our home.” Butler’s central trope has always been the idea of homes, our private Americas. But Butler’s house has many rooms. 300,000,000 is a new testament; what happens when prose becomes prophecy.

7 comments:

This is a horribly misleading one-sided article. The books under review are equally misleading. Oxycontin is no more “addictive” than chocolate, or for that matter, only other opioid or non-opioid based pain reliever. There is no proof demonstrating otherwise. There is no “epidemic” of opiate overdose or abuse. Even assuming there was, the problem is not the drug. Until there types of unthinking articles are exposed for there unexamined unsupported parroted media assumptions. The books under review do not “make a searing non-fiction triptych.” Quite the opposite. They make Big Pharma, meth, heroin and like opioids the bogey men. All four serving nothing more than collective scapegoating and deflection from the complex multivariable reasons people take or abuse drugs. As such, those books and this article insure nothing more than continued “overdoses” from opioid medications and heroin, etc (fill-in your drug of choice). How about starting with an article on why, since the beginning of recorded time, people have taken drugs, especially opioids derived drugs, without any problems of “overdosing.”

Ed, I applaud you, this is the craziest comment I’ve read on this site in some time. It’s not often you hear someone so passionately defend oxy, meth, and heroin but then again there’s a first time for everything.

“Oxycontin is no more “addictive” than chocolate, or for that matter, only other opioid or non-opioid based pain reliever.”

What a gem this sentence is. In other words, oxy is a Hershey’s kiss, or children’s tylenol.

“There is no “epidemic” of opiate overdose or abuse.”

Ha!

What’s the deal with the scare quotes around overdose? Do you believe that overdoses aren’t real? People fake overdoses for attention? People die, but don’t really die, from drugs?

I’m not sure what your ultimate point is here. If humans indeed have an innate fondness for taking drugs – and this is indeed the “problem” – are you suggesting we focus on rewiring human circuitry so that we no longer like drugs? Or do you think humans have learned to enjoy drugs, and can be learned to reject them?

I’m all for demand reduction; the War on Drugs has demonstrated that a militant supply-side focus just doesn’t work. But, as you say, humans have enjoyed drugs since time immemorial, and all the education in the world isn’t going to change that.

No need to change “circuitry.” No need to unlearn anything. Education is the key. Responsible use is the key. Creating a space for individuals who enjoy taking drugs or pursuing intoxication. Stop demonizing drugs–that is not the solution to social ills. Meth, opiates, cannabis offer tremendous benefits for an array of conditions–including recreational use..yes, recreational use–for those who so choose. Millions of people use take these drugs to positive results….Prudue Phram should have received accolades for developing “oxycontin.” Drugs are inert until someone chooses to take them. Overdoses are caused from stupidity, and from forcing people to take drugs without recourse to consult with doctor, or being forced to get drugs from underground source not revealing potency, etc–DEA would arrest them both….keep demonizing drugs, and you will continue to have these recycled “epidemics.” be it crack cocaine, methamphetamine, bath salts, etc…. what’s the next drug that will start killing off the “cheerleaders” and quarterbacks.” Look out, it could strike your town! ERS

Purdue, at the very least, pointed to non-evidence and faked charts and graphs and told doctors that it was a wonder drug and virtually non-addictive. The doctors in turn told the patients it was non-addictive. So a huge swath of these folks took the drug under false pretenses. Therefore their “decision” to take it was not even partially informed correctly. In the last 8 years Oxycontin has helped to spur opioid overdose deaths to exceed that of crack cocaine at the 8 year height of its epidemic and 70’s heroin at the 8 year height of its epidemic. It is the first “thing” to exceed automobile deaths annually since the car first became commonplace more than heart disease or cancer but yeah, it’s basically like Hershey’s chocolate and Purdue should get an award even after they’ve admitted thy lied and that it IS HIGHLY ADDICTIVE. IF they had said that from the beginning you’d have a point, but they didn’t and you don’t.

There is a difference Between being addicted to drugs and being dependent On drugs . There are many many of us That depend on opioid pain pills to take away their pain . It seems like ” they” Think that drug abuse problems can be Stopped By taking away pain pills from patients who need them for their pain and are being closely monitored by their Doctors . Why should the people that need help with their pain be punished ? And the belief that pills lead to heroin heroin use may be true in some pockets of younger people ,Who are as Quinones Describe upper middle to upper class Younger people .

There are people who have pain who are under their doctor’s care And receiveOpioid Drugs .And they are being lumped into people who abuse drugs . There is a difference between being addicted to drugs and being dependent On drugs .

The class met on weekends – three hours on Saturday, three hours on Sunday – and was filled with working people: grocery store clerks, UPS delivery guys, off-duty cops, all trying to squeeze a few extra community college credits into their overstuffed lives. A giggle ran through the room when I showed the class Art Spiegelman’sMaus, the first book on our syllabus. At the time, fifteen years ago, Maus was still fairly new, and “graphic novel” wasn’t yet a term you saw on the shelves at Barnes & Noble. My students couldn’t believe they were actually going to read a comic book for an English class, much less one that told the story of the Holocaust as a kind of Tom & Jerry cartoon with the Nazis as cats and the Jews as mice.

The students were mostly Asian and Latino immigrants, and they came to the class knowing next to nothing about Nazi Germany. In some ways, that was the most startling part of the class for me. How do you explain the slaughter of six million Jews to a group of people who couldn’t find Germany on a map? It was like describing ice cream to room full of Martians. They just couldn’t get it. Why were the Germans so mad at the Jews? Why didn’t the Jews fight back? Why didn’t the Americans just bomb the bejesus out of the camps and set all the Jews free? Finally, on the last day, when we were deep into the Auschwitz section of the book, one of the younger students, a tall, skinny Vietnamese gangbanger kid named Loc raised his hand. “It just doesn’t make sense,” he said. “They’re all white people.”

Whatever lesson plan I’d written for the day sailed out the window and for the next hour we talked about how racism works. To one degree or another, nearly every student in the class had suffered discrimination at the hands of white people, but to them, wise to the ways of the American melting pot, racism was largely a matter of skin color. To be dark was bad; to be lighter, even the tiniest bit lighter, was a gift. But what if racism wasn’t based on skin color? What if it had no fixed basis whatever? What if two groups of equally white people could hate each other to the degree that one group would try to wipe the other off the face of the earth?

The stories began to pour out. Loc, my lanky young gangbanger, talked about how much he’d hated members of a rival Vietnamese gang, even though to most Americans the two groups looked identical. Other, older students talked of Mexican-on-Mexican violence in Chiapas, Catholic-against-Communist violence in Vietnam. What made the conversation so electric was that they had moved out of their comfort zone of talking about their victimhood. Now, in many of these stories, they were the aggressors. They were the cats and other people who looked just like them were the mice. When we returned to the book, and to the stories of the Nazis’ brutal treatment of Spiegelman’s parents, Anja and Vladek, in the camps, Auschwitz was real to them in a way that no documentary film or historical lecture could have ever hoped to achieve.

I was reminded of that electrifying class session recently when I read Spiegelman’s new book, MetaMaus. Timed for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Maus, the new book is built around a series of interviews University of Chicago professor Hillary Chute conducted with Spiegelman and his family. Sprinkled between the interviews are dozens of old family photos, early drafts of certain pages of Maus, reproductions of cartoons and other art work that influenced Spiegelman, and, just for a bit of mean-spirited fun, copies of the many rejection letters he received, with the names of the editors, whose cluelessness cost their companies untold millions after Maus became a hit, there for all to see. Appendices include a full transcript of Spiegelman’s taped interviews with his father and a DVD containing hours of original audio recordings, along with more family photos and early drafts of Maus.

The book is thus little more than an artfully curated culling of Art Spiegelman’s attic, and yet for those of us who have come to regard Maus as one of the half dozen or so truly indispensable works of post-World War II American literature, it is a treasure trove of background material and historical context. More than that, though, MetaMaus is a loose, rambling treatise on the alchemical process of transforming the raw material of one’s own experience into a work of art capable of reaching – and teaching – millions.

Some may chuckle at the notion of Maus as one of a handful of truly indispensable works of post-World War II American literature. American literature since 1945 encompasses Nobel laureates Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison, along with Philip Roth, who if anybody ever listened to me, would already have his Nobel by now. The period also includes the likes of John Updike, John Cheever, Joyce Carol Oates, and Thomas Pynchon, to say nothing of more recent authors such as Tim O’Brien, David Foster Wallace, and Louise Erdrich. Do I seriously mean to compare modern classics like Beloved or Gravity’s Rainbow to a comic book?

In fact I do, and to explain why I need to go back to that community college classroom fifteen years ago. The students in that class were by no means stupid. They weren’t in the least intellectually lazy, either. I find myself annoyed by teachers like the mysterious Professor X, author of In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, who depict their students as lazy, ill-mannered lunks who have no business being in college. This view has no relationship to the reality I encountered in my years teaching in community colleges. After all, those students were giving up their weekends to take an introductory English course. They weren’t saints – I busted a plagiarist in that class, as I recall – but they understood, probably better than the kids in my classes at Fordham University today, that the American dream is built upon education, and they struck me as hungry to get started.

Still, no one in that class was ready for Saul Bellow or, God forbid, Thomas Pynchon. One of the first lessons of teaching literature in the real world is that you have to meet your students where they are, not where you want them to be. In academic jargon, this is called finding your students’ “zone of proximal development,” the sweet spot between what they already know and what they couldn’t possibly comprehend even if you were there to help them. The wonder of Maus is that it fits into everyone’s zone of proximal development. I taught it to those working-class immigrants in California fifteen years ago; I taught it at a third-rate night school in Virginia; and just last month, I taught it in an advanced writing class at Fordham, a prestigious, four-year private university. Every time, in every context, students told me they’d stayed up half the night finishing the book, and then when we discussed it in class, it took the tops of their heads off all over again. Maus is that rare work of literature that speaks to everyone while pandering to no one.

MetaMaus is a record of how Spiegelman pulled off this magic trick. The first, and perhaps most important piece of the puzzle, has to do with the form itself, the fact that Spiegelman chose to tell one of the most horrific tales of the twentieth century in the form of a barnyard comic book. In Maus, not only are the Germans cats and the Jews mice, but the Poles are pigs, the Americans are dogs, the French are frogs, and for a few antic pages late in the book, the Swedes are reindeer. But at the same time, they aren’t. In Spiegelman’s comic book, the characters have animal heads, but the rest of their bodies are human, and so far as the story is concerned, they are human. Even more perversely, the animals can wear masks to pass themselves off as other kinds of animals. Thus, when Spiegelman’s father wishes to pass as a non-Jewish Pole, in the comic his mouse character wears a pig mask, tied with a string visibly knotted in the back.

It’s a simple conceit, stolen from a million superhero comics, but set here in the middle of a story of Nazified Europe, the image makes a startlingly modern argument. Or, rather, it offers a series of startling arguments that intertwine and contradict each other in ways that only literature can do. On the one hand, Spiegelman’s central visual metaphor answers the question, in a chillingly deterministic fashion, why the Germans killed the Jews. They did it for the same reason cats chase mice: because it’s in their nature. On the other hand, if a mouse can become a pig, or even a cat, merely by behaving like one, then racial categories aren’t fixed in biology and are instead artifacts of performance. And if race is rooted in behavior, not biology, then it is essentially meaningless, and Hitler’s racial ideology is a murderous sham.

This is just one example of how Maus takes on the knottiest of historical questions in the simplest of terms, without losing any of the underlying complexity. For the dedicated reader of Maus, what is fascinating about MetaMaus is how carefully Spiegelman thought through all this complexity. MetaMaus functions as a sort of public scrapbook of the twenty-year process from Spiegelman’s first fumbling attempts to draw his parents’ story in comic book form in the early 1970s to the finished book, the second volume of which was published in 1991. At the same time, the book works at the atomic level, walking the reader through Spiegelman’s agonizingly slow process of creating individual panels, layering in his taped interviews with his father and his historical research with his encyclopedic knowledge of the comic-book genre, and then using his skill as an artist to tie it all together into an arresting visual image. Panel by painstaking panel, Spiegelman’s images serve to answer a basic question that hangs mutely over the entire project: Did this terrible thing really happen?

The Holocaust, after all, didn’t just strike Spiegelman’s family. It is a vast and controversial war crime that has inspired an enormous range of responses from outright denial to what Spiegelman calls “Holokitsch,” his term for the numbing stream of books and movies that use the backdrop of the camps to lend weight to the unbearable slightness of their premises:
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Communists ceased to be attractive as villains. I guess interest in the Holocaust really metastasized at that point: “This is the perfect hero/villain paradigm for movies.” It’s replaced cowboys and Indians… The Holocaust has become a trope, sometimes used admirably, as in Roman Polanski’sThe Pianist, or sometimes meretriciously, like in Roberto Benigni’sLife is Beautiful.
In MetaMaus, it becomes clear that Spiegelman spent almost two decades creating Maus because it took him that long to figure out how to force his readers to tune out the blaring cultural noise of Holokitsch and actually see what had happened to his parents.

To help American readers up to their eyeballs in Holokitsch see this oft-told tale anew, Spiegelman conceived of a great, overarching metaphor structure, and then, masterfully, set about getting the reader to ignore it. What we see when we open up Maus is a work of head-spinning surrealism – a bunch of people walking around with animal heads – but its power as literature lies in the fact that it presents itself as documentary realism. The very unreality of the imagery allows viewers who might never be able to sit through a realistic documentary about Auschwitz that showed dead bodies stacked like cordwood in the snow to follow Vladek and Anja Spiegelman through six long years of Nazi terror. At the same time, the humanity of their interactions, the way they talk and scheme and love one another, forces us to in effect draw faces on their mouse heads, to enter the story in our imagination. As Spiegelman puts it: “In other words, you’ve got to do the work the same way you do when you’re reading prose, and Maus retains that attribute of prose.”

It is this liminal state – part comic book, part family saga, part war documentary – that explains the book’s staying power as a teaching tool and as a work of literature a quarter century after the first volume appeared. Maus is, like the comic books that inspired it, a profoundly democratic text, accessible to anyone who has ever sat in front of a TV on a Saturday morning. Yet unlike its many imitators, it doesn’t stop there. The book demands that its readers “do the work,” look closely and follow its many telling details, and in doing so, readers melt into the story, becoming not just the mice, but also, terrifyingly, the cats and pigs that torment them.

I think it’s in everybody’s best interests for reviewers to confess their prejudices at the outset, so here’s mine: I’m not, generally speaking, particularly enthralled by expletive-laden texts. I typically find such writing more tedious than bold—which probably makes me hopelessly square, but there you have it. I’ll confess that my heart sank a little when I read the first few pages of Kyle Thomas Smith’s 85A. Smith’s debut novel is concerned with Seamus O’Grady, a Holden Caulfieldish figure in late-eighties Chicago, who at the book’s opening is being hounded by a local bully. The bully lurks across the street “all the fuckin’ time.” But the bully didn’t actually drink the whiskey in the bottle he just threw through Seamus’ window, because he’s “too much of a pussy.” Holden Caulfield never talked like this.

But that’s exactly the point, isn’t it? Holden wasn’t a punk teenager in the gang-ridden streets of Chicago at the tired end of the eighties, and this novel is so well-written that my quibbles with the language quickly seemed irrelevant. Foul-mouthed or not, the narrative voice rings true. As the book opens, Seamus is waiting for the 85A bus. It’s January 23, 1989, the temperature’s five below zero, and things haven’t been going that well lately. Seamus is fifteen, gay, and hopelessly at odds with the world he finds himself in. He’s disgusted by the racism of his whites-only neighborhood, unable to find a toehold in the local punk scene, persecuted by bullies and rapidly flunking out of St. Xavier, the private school where he hasn’t managed to acquire a single friend.

His homophobic older brother beats him up occasionally, and his parents barely tolerate him. More reasonable parents might be concerned for their son’s safety around the time whiskey bottles start coming through windows, but Seamus’ parents are more inclined to blame their son. “What the hell’s wrong with Seamus,” his father asks his mother, “that he’s getting death threats and you’re getting these calls?”

Seamus is sad, and angry, and mostly alone. His only friend is Tressa, a supremely confident mixed-race prodigy who once saved him from a beating by skinheads. She introduces him to a world beyond the stratified city, the bigotry of his neighborhood, the narrow cliques of his school. She schools him in Mozart and Balzac and Tchaikovsky, Henry Miller and Kafka. Seamus is a gifted writer and actor, intelligent but hopelessly distracted and unable to focus in class, the kind of kid who memorizes Blake poems and writes plays but can’t pass high school English. He idolizes Johnny Rotten and harbors vague dreams of a luminous future: “I hope to be Mozart one day. I mean, I don’t want to compose symphonies or anything. I’m no good at music. … Still, I want to do something like what Mozart did. Sit at a desk, write hour after hour after hour for a living without stopping…” Later, a line that will stay with me for a while: “I’d like to live in dreams.”

Seamus’ dreams involve London, a city he plans on fleeing to as soon as he’s old enough, but as the day of January 23, 1989 progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that he won’t be able to wait that long: the 85A bus is delayed, and he’s late for school. St. Xavier needs only one more infraction to expel him, and this is it. As the day winds down and the expulsion papers are prepared, as his family’s reaction to the expulsion turns to violence, Seamus is forced to prepare for an immediate departure.

The book’s flaws—an over-reliance on expletives, a slight slackening of momentum in the middle stretch, a few too many exclamation marks—seem minor in the final analysis. 85A is blessed with one of the most appealing and unique narrators I’ve come across in fiction in a while. The vivid city of Chicago, with its punks and bohemians, its neighborhoods and graffiti and breathtakingly cold winters, is very nearly a character in itself. This is an exciting and sharply-written debut.

We are, in short, not watching movies -- or living our lives -- with the full capacity that once seemed so natural to us. We are more and more unable to submit, and our films and our lives suffer for it.